Once we’d finished eating the mystery meat, mystery veg, and mystery dessert (that might have also been meat, I’m not sure), it was time for after-dinner announcements. This old guy I didn’t recognize got up in the middle of the Chow Pit and clapped his hands for everyone to be quiet. Amazingly, everything got real quiet, real fast.
“Who’s that?” I asked Dweebs.
“That’s Major Sherwood,” he said. “We call him the Dictator. You definitely don’t want to get on his bad side. And he doesn’t have a good side.”
“Really?” I said. “He looks kind of harmless.”
“I know, right?” Smurf said. “Go figure.”
“Hello, boys!” Major Sherwood said. “And welcome to another summer at Camp Wannamorra!”
Everyone clapped and cheered then, including me, since I didn’t know any better.
“This is the first and last time your counselors will be waiting on you, so don’t get used to it,” Sherwood said, all smiley-faced. “The young men of Camp Wannamorra look out for themselves. Isn’t that right, boys?”
“Yes, sir!” a bunch of the campers yelled back. This time, I noticed that nobody at my table said a word, except for Rusty.
After that, things started sounding a little more… familiar.
“As most of you know, I like to run a tight ship around here,” Sherwood said. “To that end, there are certain guidelines one needs to follow. So let’s start off by going over a few of the expectations we have of our campers here, shall we?”
It was all getting clearer by the second. Tight ship? Guidelines? Expectations? Just another way of saying RULES, RULES, and MORE RULES.
And Camp Wannamorra had plenty of them. I know, because Major Sherwood told us about every single one.
There were rules about not wasting water or electricity or food or paper or “other resources” (whatever that meant).
There were rules about keeping our cabins clean every day and about taking a shower at least once a week.
Camp Wannamorra was a “Personal Electronics–Free Zone,” which meant that anyone caught with a phone or an iPod or a laptop could kiss it goodbye for the rest of the summer.
We weren’t allowed to wander off by ourselves, and we definitely weren’t allowed to go into the adults-only areas of the camp.
Curfew was nine o’clock. Sharp. No exceptions.
Lights-out was ten o’clock. Sharp. No exceptions.
Wake-up was seven o’clock. Sharp. Unless you were up at six or five.
School started at eight (sharp, like a needle to the eye).
There was absolutely no storing of food in the cabins. No sneaking over to the girls’ camp. No this, no that, no… I’m not even sure what else. My brain hit FULL a long time before Major Sherwood was anywhere near done. But I was definitely starting to see where his nickname came from.
Finally, somewhere after dinner and before the end of time, I guess that Major Sherwood ran out of rules to tell us about.
“All righty, then,” he said. “Enough of that. How about we have a little fun before curfew?”
That sounded good to me. I was hoping he meant Capture the Flag, or making s’mores, or something like that. But instead, someone handed him a guitar, and he started playing. And you know what? He was even worse than my sister, Georgia, who plays in a band called We Stink.
I actually recognized the tune of the song. It was this old one Mom used to sing in the car. She said it was called “Guantanamera,” which is Spanish for something, but I always thought it sounded like “One-Ton Tomato.”
It turned out that “One-Ton Tomato” was also the camp song, but with its own words.
Camp Wan-na-morra!
We’re here at Camp Wan-na-morra!
Camp Wan-na-mooooooor-ra!
We all love Camp Wan-na-morra!
Everyone sang along off-key while Major Sherwood played his guitar and walked around from table to table. And even though I was still learning the new words, I moved my mouth up and down and pretended like I was singing. It was only the first night of camp, after all. I didn’t know what Dweebs meant about not getting on Sherwood’s bad side, but I figured this wasn’t the time to find out.
Hopefully, if the real fun ever started, somebody would let me know.
We’re here at Camp Wan-na-morra!
Eight weeks at Camp Wan-na-morra!
Please help me get through to-morr-a.